An incorrigible Cognitive Dissident

BUDGET: The haunting of Philip Hammond

Today’s Budget was a 0-0 draw in which the new Chancellor promised increasingly distant goals, and the new Shadow Chancellor played without a forward line. Occasionally amusing but mainly depressing, it highlighted the mediocrity of Conservative spin, the haunted man at the Treasury, and the hopeless failure of Opposition ideologists.

Vonny the turbo-driven female cattle auctioneer at Boombust TV obviously has a bit of a thing for our shiny new Chancellor of the Exchequer. So much so, she’s taken to calling him ‘Phil’. It comes out like Feel Heeyamon, and you have to laugh because it’s just so totally (or toedallee) unlikely: whichever way you think your way into this one, when Hammond goes down the pub, you just know they call him Philip. Or “Mr Hammond, sir”.

To be fair to Hammond minor, he or somebody in his entourage knows how to write a witty line. I would say that in his maiden effort today, he came across as quite a wag. And I don’t mean by that he shags footballers, although in these surreal times it wouldn’t surprise me: I mean he gives good standup. You get the feeling he may have started out in Geordie Working Mens’ clubs, and then added the accent later.

As for the meat of the speech, I’d call it the triumph of woffle over offal. Like all pols of every hue these days, he starts from the entirely reasonable assumption that most voters can add up the scores in Strictly, but not much else. So he says “one billion Pounds” as if it might be the global gdp, and people are impressed.

Bunging a £1bn investment into internet infrastructure is like offering an alcoholic 1p off a pint of shandy. It’s under 10% of what Microsoft wrote off dumping Windows8. It is a new-born whalette weeing into the biggest ocean you can imagine.

But he got away with it (as these gargoyles usually do) for three reasons: one, he smiled a lot and evoked hear-hears; two, hacks are a mixture of paid bumboys and The Severely Stupid; and three, as always the Opposition not only hasn’t got a clue….it knows neither the problem nor the cure. Park that one, and we’ll come back to it a little later.

He may smile and he may crack jokes, but I have the measure of Mr Hammond. Call it what you will – a lifetime of watching body language or good old-fashioned commonsense discernment with added research – I know Philip Hammond is a haunted man.

Equally, it sounds forceful and radical for Hammond to go back to one Budget a year, but I would guess that even the thickest plank watching his speech today will wonder whatTF relevance it has to anything….apart from making Phil less accountable than he is already.

On his forehead, Phil has a sign in flashing Dayglo that says ‘Ambitious snake who wants to be Prime Minister’. No matter how much he tries to distract his audience, it’s still there – winking on and off like unwanted diner-neon torturing a man with no curtains who desperately needs to sleep…the better to wake up next day and take over the world.

For Hammond knows – being a learned man and student of political history via his Oxford PPE degree – that a poisoned Chancellery does not a Prime Minister make. He has inherited the arithmetic of a draper’s prodigal powder-pooped son, and he needs a way out of it. Otherwise, he realises, he will just go down in the annals as another nonentity unable to make the giant leap from Number 11 to Number 10.

So his only chance is to keep putting off what’s been put off for far too long. Although things are as bad as they could possibly be, Hammond says they won’t get any worse….in this Parliament. He says “welfare spending spiraled out of control”, but he doesn’t include bankers – by far Britain’s biggest sovereign cost – in that definition. He keeps on using the IMF as a source for UK economic outlook when it’s always wrong. He abandons Osborne’s 2020 deficit balance for a limp “some point in the next Parliament” prediction.

But he’s a shrewd lad, our Phil: having inherited a whopping debt, he is that man desperately in need of a scapegoat to explain political failure.

And of course – he being a Remoaner – the sacrificial goat is Brexit.

So it is that the Chancellor – during every available interview since his speech today – has been saying that “the cost of Brexit is even worse than we thought”.

It could, he said, be “as much as £220 billion”. My God: that’s almost 20% of a bank bailout.

But when pushed, Hammers says the hit will be £58bn. Another figure picked from the air. Another stat based on nothing beyond the back of a recycled Treasury envelope. More scaremongery adding no grist to the rumour-mill.

At base-level, this is what haunts Philip Hammond: he has a horrible feeling that Brexit will not deliver the disaster he needs. He senses that Theresa May will go for a Spring election next year “because Remoaners are trying to wreck Brexit”. And he fears that – with nothing and nobody to blame except himself – he will end up a Nowhere Man with nothing he dare blame.

In that context, you’d have thought deconstructing the Hammond bollocks should’ve been a relatively easy task for Old McDonnell: surely he would point out that “jobs growth” in terms of hours/wages is a statistical fantasy, and the National Debt is now 50% higher than in 2010? Surely he could give out with an attention-getting (and justified) analogy based on maxed-out credit cards?

But Old McDonnell had not a farm. He had not even a yarn. He offered only a yawn. His response was a squib soaked in small-beer statistics – the monotone stumbling delivery of a Stalinist technocrat talking of “no new ideas”, while offering none himself. It showed no passion, no persuasion, no preparation, and above all no punch. The Chancellor dismissed it as if he might be swatting the last, slow surviving fly of Autumn.

All of these people are a waste of money and space. They’re either filling their pockets or full of ideological shit. They’re abusing the supply of Nitrous Oxygen we have available on the planet. Nothing will change until we change to a system encouraging creative ideas, and suspicious of dead-hand Whiteminster process.

18 thoughts on “BUDGET: The haunting of Philip Hammond”

Heard an economist on the beeb this a.m. I didn’t catch his name (he might have been Greek). He said that the west has been following the wrong economic model for the last two decades ie that finance would drive growth (I think longer, ever since Freidmanites and Thatcher embraced Moneytarism)

His conclusion was that gov spending should be on real stuff, infrastructure broadband etc, which will benefit ‘real wealth creation”.

@ Mark Deacon, which is best 1 billion printed out of thin air to spend on infrastucture or many more billions given to banks in QE.

The deterioration in the UK budget has happened BEFORE BREXIT has had any effect. The future is being used as an excuse to avoid analysing a failed economic model, in which immigrants are drawn to the UK to do low productivity, lowly paid jobs. The mean GDP per capita has fallen so that it is no longer capable of sustaining the services provided by the UK state.

John
My mind is slowing down … too musch stuff …. bear with me!
Would I be correct in thinking : “The £75 million Channel 4 paid for the Great British Ripoff.. Is/was/will be…. Tax payers dosh ?”
A public service broadcaster should not need to follow the road hog route.
In fact. I think some media folk should payC4! ..for the exposure they get.
dofornow

Hmm.. some of them probably do but I doubt if it’s a large number. My sister, may she prosper always, is a celebrated aficionado of Rudolf’s teachings, has spent a lot of her life working in various Steiner communities, and I have been reasonably acquainted with the precepts. I may be a tad fussy but I am not entirely convinced by the dogma that underlies some of them. The problem with life is, if it doesn’t get you one way it gets you another. Having said that, I entirely agree that there is an obsession with the ‘virtual’ at the expense of the virtuous.

The goons in Silicon Valley send their kids to the Waldorf/ Steiner system of schools. I think about 150 of them in America and about 34 in the UK. – China also has some
At these schools the kids are strictly forbidden to use a computer, a mobile phone or go near wifi equipment until they are 15.
Seems to me that it is us who are the goons. These people design the systems for our children to use but keep their own kids away from it completely

Hammond came onto my radar when he was Minister for Defense. i watched him lie thru’ his teeth many times supporting NATO and Washington warmongering.
I concluded that he is a puppet of the Establishment and overly ambitious ,without scruples.
There is something Machiavellian about him and of the night.
I do not expect he has any altruistic motives to the population of the UK.He is a creature of the City banking cartel and will further their agenda. The reduction in Corporation tax is just an indicator of the direction of Tory policy.
Nothing new here to see from a Tory Govt. who serve the interests of the Plutocracy and ignore the remainder of the population.
A dilatory, dumbed down population is incapable of rising above their misery to throw out these Tory Govt scoundrels.

———————–
Agreed. And naivety. Nobody in Whitehall (with very few parachuted in exception) has had a commercial career of any kind; so the private bidders run rings round them…..and then invest extras.
It beggars belief that a contract holder like HMG doesn’t make every bid fixed price with time penalties. JW

What I have wanted to know for a long time, a question I can never get a sensible answer to is why, to use a simple example where like is to like, a mile of London Underground tunnel cost about £7 million in the 1960s yet a mile of London Underground tunnel today is projected to cost £1 billion. That, for the numerically challenged, is 143 times as much. Now I know old Harold wasn’t being entirely honest about pounds in pockets but, 143 times as much? It ain’t inflation, although that has done a number, by that measure a £ spent in 1960 would be the same as £21 today, so 21 times, so how does everything now cost billions?

According to Westminster custom, the difference between The Budget and The Autumn Statement is that the chancellor is allowed an alcoholic drink whilst presenting the former to the House. Maybe that’s why he’s ditched the latter!

Dam’ right – they’re all a waste of space.
Actually, I reckon that the two worst things invented by mankind are —–
governments ——and ——-
geeks. The goons in Silicion Valley who are always fiddling with the algorithms and screwing up what you’re used to doing on your computer……